DIY Ornaments

Once December 1^st hits, then it’s time to put up the Christmas tree. Mine went up this weekend. Usually it’s a work in progress as the first step is putting up the tree and then the next few days and weeks, we add ornaments to it.

We thought that it might be a fun idea to make some ornaments this week. In the past we have painted ceramic and wooden shapes, but this year we thought we’d use the plastic ornaments that you can find at the craft store which open up. We’re going to open them up and fill them to decorate as well as paint them.

Again, this one is a really inexpensive craft to make with items that you can easily get at the dollar store or probably even find at home.

Painting the ornaments takes more time so you’ll want to do this further in advance if you want to give them away or hang them up. We’ve picked a variety of colours for paint to use; some are Christmasy and some are not. We also have a bunch of different sizes of brushes and some sponges as well. You can pre-sketch out some designs or you can free style it and come up with your design as you go. Do whatever you like. Here’s what we came up with...

This is a drip paint ornament. What we've done is pick a couple of matching colours and dripped them into the ornaments and moved the paint around by turning the ornaments. We did this process a few times to get all of the area covered. Then we let them hang upside down overnight to drain out the excess paint and this is what we got...

Another option to is to fill the ornaments with curled ribbons, shredded snow, larger glitter bits, small punched shapes, or coloured paper or paper from old books so that you can see the words.

For both, you can put ribbons/bows on the outside to adorn the finished ornaments.  

Now you can hang them up in your tree or around your house or you can make a bunch and hand them out as gift this year.  

Snowman Decoration

We’re taking inspiration from our “Snowmen Tobogganing” card this week and we are making a homemade snowman decoration to adorn your house this season.

You just need some basic supplies, some of which you may already have in your house and if you don’t, they can be very inexpensive to pick up. We went to the dollar store and found a few things that we needed.

You’ll need two-three Styrofoam balls (one bigger than the other if you’re using two or three different sized ones if you’re using more), white glue and something to apply it with, thick decorative ribbon for a scarf, a bread knife, assorted buttons, toothpicks, shredded snow, a glue gun, felt for a hat, and some popsicle sticks.   

Prep your work space because this could be a messy craft. We laid out some newspaper over our table and then we also got out a paper plate and placed all of our snow on that.

Our snowman is going to be a two baller so first of all, cut what’s to be the bottom of the smaller (head) ball and then the top of the (body) so that they can lay flat when connected together.

Now apply the white glue to both balls and roll in the shredded snow. Let it dry and allow the glue to harden.

Next use the glue gun to glue the top and bottom together.

Glue gun on buttons down the center and buttons for the eyes and mouth.

For the nose we have taken some orange cardstock and cut it into a triangle and glued it on.

Glue a cut in half popsicle stick on both sides as the arms.

Now it’s time for the hat. We’re using some felt pieces that we had left over from a Christmas blog craft that we have done in the past. Take a piece of felt, we chose green. Make it into a cylinder and glue the edges together; make sure it fits your snowman’s head. Gather about half of it as the top “pom” and secure it with an elastic band. Cut slits in the top half to make it look like tassels. Now cover the elastic band with string, pipe cleaner, or ribbon. Now you have a little hat. You can just rest it on top or if you'd like, put a little dab of glue on it to keep it in place.

Lastly, use a wider patterned/decorative piece of ribbon and tie/glue it around the neck of your snowman as a scarf.  

Here’s our finished snowman...

Christmas Tradition #8 - Gingerbread Cookies

It’s the last post before Christmas. Hard to believe it’s Christmas already this Monday. I am doing my usual holiday baking, making lots of cookies and cakes.

One tradition that we haven’t talked about yet is gingerbread. Whenever you think about gingerbread, you think about Christmastime. I used to make and decorate houses when I was little and always get a decorated gingerbread man with Smartie buttons and icing. I have to admit that I would usually bite off the icing bits and Smartie buttons and leave the rest for my mom, but they are a yummy treat for this time of year.

Last Christmas I made my very first batch of gingerbread men on my own. I found a really easy recipe that you can make ahead of time and freeze the dough for whenever you are ready to make some.

Take a look at the recipe below. You can bake them right away or like I said, you can make the dough and then bake them when you are ready which is what I did this time around.

Gingerbread Cookies

 3 cups of flour

¾ cup brown sugar

¾ tsp. baking soda

1 tbsp. cinnamon

1 tbsp. ground ginger

½ tsp. salt

12 tbsp. butter, softened

¾ cup molasses

2 tbsp. milk

Mix the dry ingredients together in the mixer bowl and then put it on “stir” to mix them all up.

  

Add the butter until it’s like sand.

With the mixer going, add the molasses and the milk. When the dough comes together, then it’s ready.

Pat into two separate balls and wrap in plastic wrap. You can let them sit in the fridge for about an hour or so and then roll them out and cut shapes or you can label then and place them in the freezer until you are ready to use them. If you plan to use them in the next day or so then you can leave them wrapped tightly in the fridge. 

If you are making them right away and have all your shapes cut out, then you can place them on a cookie sheet with parchment paper and bake for 8-11 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Let the cookies cool on wire racks.

You can decorate your cookies once they have cooled with candies and chocolate treats. Take a look at this post that we did for sugar cookies for Valentine’s Day and try using this same icing on your gingerbread cookies. http://paperwhitecreations.blogspot.ca/2014/02/valentine-baking.html

 

Enjoy your cookies and Merry Christmas!

Christmas Traditions #7- Ornaments

I know we have talked about Christmas décor and ornaments already but today we’re gonna go a little further and explore the tradition of the Christmas ornament a bit more and make some too!

Christmas trees were traditionally decorated with things like fruit (usually apples), candy canes, and different shaped pastries.

Glass ornaments were first introduced in Germany by Hans Greiner in the late 1500’s. He made garlands of tin and glass beads. Since these ornaments were so popular, eventually people began to experiment and made what we see as the “traditional” Christmas tree ornament, glass balls decorated that have a cap and hook near the top. Mass productions of ornaments began in in New York in 1890 after Woolworth sold the German imported versions in 1880. Of course now you can find ornaments in all shapes and sizes some are mass produced but you can find some many handcrafted with lots of details.

You can also make your own ornaments which is what we are going to do today. We found some cool paper ornaments on Curbly .com so we are going to try these out with our own modifications.

These are super cute and very easy to make. Again we are making use of our leftover card strips.

We used three sizes of strips 5”, 5 ¾”, 6 ¾”. If you take a look at the link below you will see that they use different lengths for different size ornaments. They cut theirs down to certain sizes but we just used our leftover strips that all are ¾ inches wide and most of them are all about 6 ¾ inches long and then we just cut them accordingly.

We used one of the 5” strips, two of the 5 ¾” strips, and two of the 6 ¾” strips.

Once you have your strips ready to go then layer or sandwich them together starting with the longest one, then medium one, then the smallest one in the middle, and then the other medium one, and finally the other longest one. You can pick any colours you want as well.

You can hold all of the strips together with a foldback clip and then staple all the strips together, glue all the bits together near the ends, or you can punch a hole and use an eyelet which is a handy hole to hang it from later on. 

If you tape it together, you will need to make a hole at the top of the ornament so that you can put a ribbon through it to hang it up.

If you staple it, you can cut some small complimentary coloured bits to cover the staples.

Feel inspired and want to make more ornaments? Then follow the links to some other cool DIY ornaments that we found. 

https://www.curbly.com/9452-how-to-make-modern-paper-ornaments

https://www.diyncrafts.com/9606/decor/20-hopelessly-adorable-diy-christmas-ornaments-made-paper